And The Debt Deal Winner Is...Somebody

I kept drifting in and out of football games all afternoon, checking back in every now and then to see if somebody had managed to get the bats in the House Of Representatives to fly in formation. Come the Orange Bowl, and it looked like the Senate bill was going to come cleanly to the floor of the House for an up-or-down vote. If this whole fiasco ends in an orgy of orgasmic praise for "bipartisanship" and "compromise," let alone a whole vaudeville act set up around the concept of a "new era" of cooperation inside the Beltway, the attitude of the late Keith Moon toward television sets and windows is going to be worth another look.

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It was truly a remarkable spectacle to watch so many congresscritters from both sides of the aisle congratulate themselves for coming to the end of the drama without impaling the entire economy on a spike and leaving it for the daws to peck at. The gorge didn't exactly reach high tide until David Dreier, a Republican from California who is leaving Congress to get rich, got up and said how it was Congress's job "to restore hope and optimism to the American people." Yes, this is the same David Dreier who helped waste a year of the country's time chasing Bill Clinton's penis around the Beltway. "We must always be prepared to compromise in the service of our principles," he said, saying absolutely nothing. He later pointed out that he "was taking the Madisonian directive" and returning to California, where I am sure he will become a gentleman farmer and absolutely have nothing to do with lobbying his former colleagues, and I am also the Tsar of all the Russias. In the name of god, go!

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Steny Hoyer, on the other hand, regretted that "this is not a big, bold, balanced plan." I don't. I don't trust either side to develop a big, bold, balanced plan that doesn't pretty much hose most of the country because, in too many cases, their constituencies are no longer most of the people in the country. (How many times have you heard the current deal praised because The Markets were happy and how many times have you heard it praised because it extended unemployment benefits for a niggling 12 months? Thought so.) After a while, I found myself grateful for the Republicans who were holding out against their leadership, because at least their honest contempt for the obligations of governing the nation, and their honest hatred of the Democrats, and their honest loathing for the concept of a political commonwealth, and their resolute insistence on ignoring the election of last November had a simple clarity to it. (I heard Ed Royce talk about how they'd kept off all of us the onerous chains of The Death Tax. The Death Tax! It was like hearing "Free Bird" on your classic rock station.) Sander Levin called bullshit on all of that, and that was good to hear, too, because otherwise, it was like hearing a bunch of guys playing "Kumbaya" on their switchblades.

Sorry, kids, but this is not the way the system is supposed to work. This whole puppet show was the result of a jerry-rigged burlesque of the legislative process that was devised a year ago because the House had been rendered dysfunctional by a claque of feral children. This whole puppet show likely will be replayed — with even more spectacular special effects! — in March when we deal with Fiscal Cliff 2: Sequester Boogaloo because of jerry-rigged burlesques that are part of this new deal of which everyone is so very proud. My man Chuck Todd is calling the sequel, "March Madness." If the pundits are already being cutesy about it, the March thing could be a nightmare.

This is a continuation, not of the proper constitutional order of things, but of Government By Improv. There is no serious coalition in evidence here, no matter how many Democrats offered themselves up to defibrillate John Boehner's career. This was a deal cobbled together by the vice-president and the minority leader of the Senate and passed by a Republican House with more Democratic votes than Republican votes. This leaves the government still in a weird, suspended place, creating tiny mechanisms within itself on the fly just to keep running, and then newer tiny mechanisms on the fly to keep the previous tiny mechanisms running. Sooner or later, you can't improvise your way out of your basic problems, which is that one of your two political parties continues to have a kind of prion disease eating away at its brain. This deal last night did not extinguish the nihilistic streak in the Republican party, nor its delight in legislative vandalism.

The president made it quite clear in his late-night appearance that he's still interested in a Grand Bargain, that he's interested in "reforming" Medicare — Look out below! — and that he wants to be sure that everyone knows that there is spending to be cut in the government, and that the deficit is still the primary focus of his economic agenda. He talked tough about the debt ceiling, but there is absolutely nothing he can do unilaterally about it. (Hell, we actually hit the debt ceiling yesterday.) He seems to believe more than anyone else that some sort of precedent was set last night. I think he's very, very wrong about that. Last night, at literally the 11th hour of the first day of 2013, the House Of Representatives condescended to do a little part of its job. To borrow a phrase from Chris Rock, what do they want? A cookie?

And then, after everybody stopped watching, the Republicans adjourned the House without voting on a bill that would have extended aid to the victims of superstorm Sandy. The last act of this glorious night of bipartisan compromise on the part of the House majority was to flip off people who are still picking through the rubble in the middle of winter.